The world wide web still isn't all that worldwide. An exhaustive new study by McKinsey & Company (really, it's 120 pages long) about the barriers to Internet adoption around the world illuminates a rather surprising reality: 4.4 billion people scattered across the globe, including 3.2 billion living in only 20 countries, still aren't connected to the Internet.

Visit the last standing wonder of the ancient world

Until now, scientists had better maps of the surface of Mars than of this ocean floor. These images show for the first time a dramatic underwater landscape with mountains higher than Mont Blanc and ridges deeper than the Grand Canyon – all 4.5 kilometres below the surface of the Southern Indian Ocean. The discoveries were made as part of the hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner, flight MH370, which disappeared six months ago.

Map of jihadist groups around the world.

When we talk about greenhouse gas emissions, it’s usually in the form of one big number (bigger every year) representing the global total. There’s also the concentration of CO­2 in the atmosphere, which knows no borders. When it comes time to talk policy (during UN climate negotiations, for example), national totals for the top emitters will enter the conversation—too often to aid an argument that some other country should be the one to start doing all the work.

A list of 50 delicious (un)official dishes of each of the 50 states of America.

A map of all of Liam Neeson's kills from various movies

Gallup's well-being data takes a comprehensive look at 135 countries.

Autonomous vehicles will sport sophisticated sensors and radar systems to read and react to their surroundings, but their robotic drivers still will require vivid and current roadmaps to put the various inputs into context.

Apple seems to be a little confused when it comes to Canadian geography. Consumers who hit Apple.ca to pre-order one of the company’s new iPhones and clicked on a link about delivery timelines saw an error-riddled map of Canada.

We know that the Earth and the solar system are located in the Milky Way galaxy. But how, exactly, does the Milky Way fit in among the billions of other galaxies in the known universe? In a fascinating new study for Nature, a team of scientists mapped thousands of other galaxies in our immediate vicinity, and discovered that the Milky Way is part of a truly massive "supercluster" of galaxies that they named Laniakea.

Scientists have used a new Earth-observation satellite called Sentinel-1A to map the ground movements caused by the earthquake that shook up California's wine-producing Napa Valley on 24 August 2014.

Fifty million children will start school this week as historic changes are under way in the U.S. public school system. As of 2011 48 percent of all public school students were poor* and this year, students of color will account for the majority of public school students for the first time in US history.

Russia has struck back in the Twitter war of the maps after Canada offered some not-so-friendly travel tips for the Russian military: a map showing Russia and labelling Ukraine as “not Russia”.

If Russian soldiers were in any doubt where their country was on the map, they can rest a bit easier now. In response to claims that Vladimir Putin's troops stumbled into Ukraine 'by mistake', Canadian NATO officials have posted a mocking tweet complete with a primary school-style geography lesson. The message contains a rather helpful map which is colour-coded and marked in block letters to clearly show that Ukraine was 'NOT RUSSIA' and that Russia was indeed 'RUSSIA'.

Gas leaks are huge trouble. Leaky pipes are not only prone to exploding (which is already terrible, of course), they also spew out methane -- a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide in contributing to climate change. The bad news is, nobody's been monitoring gas leaks closely, so Google Earth Outreach and the Environmental Defense Fund teamed up to do the job back in July.

Last year, a pair of researchers from Duke University published a report with a bold title: “The End of the Segregated Century.” U.S. cities, the authors concluded, were less segregated in 2012 than they had been at any point since 1910. But less segregated does not necessarily mean integrated–something this incredible map makes clear in vivd color.

Spotify today unveiled Serendipity, an online map that displays a stream of coordinates when two users played the same song at the same time. Serendipity isn't live, but is reflective of real-time data recorded recently over a one hour period. As each pair of listeners flashes onto the screen, the song they chose starts playing for a few fleeting moments before another song comes on.

Researchers have for the first time extensively mapped Greenland's and Antarctica's ice sheets with the help of the ESA satellite CryoSat-2 and have thus been able to prove that the ice crusts of both regions momentarily decline at an unprecedented rate. In total the ice sheets are losing around 500 cubic kilometers of ice per year.

With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine, it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.